Title: Faces of Modern American Literaturea Transnational and Transcultural Reading
1Faces of Modern American Literaturea
Transnational and Transcultural Reading
- Zhu Ying Julia
- American Studies Program
- East China Normal University
- 1 June 2007, Shanghai
2Outline
- I. The Past is an Inexhaustible ResourceToni
Morrisons Beloved - II. The Past Survives through TracesTheresa Hak
Kyung Chas Dictee - III. The Past as an Uncanny TrespasserDavid
Marshall Chans Goblin Fruit
3Paul Ricoeur The Reality of the Historical Past
(1984)
- three categories
- The Same the past is re-enacted in the
present through documentary evidence and
imaginative construction - The Other the past is a pertinent absence due
to temporal distance and otherness - The Analogue the past is re-created by the
integration of re-enacting and distancing
4I. The Past is an Inexhaustible ResourceToni
Morrisons Beloved
- a. Living and Imagining the
Historicalrevising the Same slave-narrative
tradition - b. Rememorying the Past Configuring and
TranslationBeloved and rememory as the Other - c. History Goes on Repatterned and
Re-enactedstorytelling as a process of the
Analogue
5Toni Morrison
- I cant change the future but I can change
the past - (Taylor-Guthrie xiii)
6National Amnesia
- We live in a land where the past is always
erased, Morrison contends, the past is absent
or its romanticized. This American culture
doesn't encourage dwelling on, let alone coming
to terms with the truth about the past (Gilroy
179).
7Historical Evidence Historical Imagination
- Margaret Garner A Tale of Horror in The
Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (29 Jan. 1856)
- James Van Der Zees photostory in The Harlem Book
of the Dead (1978)
8a. Beloved as a historical novel
- It comes to those terrible spaces that
nineteenth-century autobiographical slave
narratives could not write about - It rips that veil drawn over proceedings too
terrible to relate (Morrison, Site 110)
- Sethes backAmy a chokecherry tree
- The tree (trace) of scars on Sethes back is a
living trace or record of the sufferings of the
slaves a bearer of mute testimony to forgotten
histories (Ellmann 46)
9b. Rememory Beloved
- Morrisons coinage
- noun and verb visual and spatial quality
individual and collective (Beloved 35-36) - memory as thought with a threat of repetition
(Derrida 106) - continual entry and re-entry of past into
present (Ferguson 112)
- Sethes murdered daughter returnedan incubus of
personal past - Survivor from the Middle Passagea historical
trace - Unceremoniously buried slavesan absence of
history
10c. Reenacting with a Difference
- Definers vs. DefinedSchoolteacher, sheriff, Paul
D., and Sethe - double entendre pass on
- sharing overlooking
- ambivalent ending Beloved remembrance
forgetfulness
11Historia vs. Fictio (Facere)
- As a work of fiction bound up with history,
Beloved aims to free, retrospectively, certain
possibilities that were not actualized in the
historical past, and to perform its
liberating function. The quasi-past of fiction in
this way becomes the detector of possibilities
buried in the actual past (Ricoeur,
Interweaving 191-92)
12II. The Past Survives through TracesTheresa Hak
Kyung Chas Dictee
- From another epic another history. From the
missing narrative. From the multitude of
narratives. Missing. From the chronicles. For
another telling for other recitations -
- (Dictee 81)
13Paul Ricoeur
- the past survives by leaving a trace
-
- --The Reality of the Historical
Past (11)
14Ricoeurs Three Categories
- a. The SameDictee is an imaginative and
incoherent re-construction of documentary facts - b. The OtherDictee is a female and
polycultural side of the Word - c. The AnalogueDictee is an enigmatic
re-enactment of history and poetry
15a. Dictee is a generic hybrid
- Various dictation and translation exercises,
including prayers, liturgical texts, mythological
allusions, documents of Korean history, which is
a history of repression but also one of rebellion
against the political and cultural repression by
the Japanese. - Chas mothers history of exile in Manchuria
where she was forbidden to speak her Korean
mother tongue. - The uprising of 1919 led by the Korean Jeanne
dArc, Yu Guan Soon, in which thousands were
killed.
16collage
- Personal letters, passages from history books, a
petition sent by Hawaiian Koreans to President
Theodore Roosevelt about the brutality of the
Japanese Occupation (that the President ignored) - Excerpts from the autobiography of Saint Thérèse
of Lisieux with a variety of visual texts
- Empty pages and spaces between paragraphs marking
rapture, collapse of voice, or meditative
silence photographs, film stills, Korean,
Chinese, and Japanese pictorial signs, the
reproductions of handwritten letters, of
paintings, maps, and illustrations such as four
views of the larynx where voice is formed, speech
uttered.
17Dictee (1982)
- A product of dictationa French dictation,
presumably at a school of French Catholic
missionaries. - Dictee, dictation opens a wide range of
associations concerning power and repression the
minds submission to the authority of the written
wordfrom the rule of teachers to that of priests
or missionaries, dictators and military
oppressors, colonial regimes, or bureaucratic
dispensers of immigrant identity.
18b. dictée
- A metaphor of political, linguistic, and cultural
dominance. - Dictée has an additional meaningthe person who
receives, is perhaps even formed by, dictation,
is female since dictée also implies the gender
of its object. - Against the male and (mono)cultural written
dictum/decree, it sets a female voice and a
polycultural perception that emphasizes
difference.
19Dicteenine chapters
- Diseuse the opening sectionidentifies the
narrator as female story teller, but also implies
that someone is being spoken, who repeats and
mimics but cannot yet speak for herself, stutters
and stammers but is slowly and painfully finding
voice and articulation The wait from pain to
say. To not to. SayThe pause. Uttering. Hers
now. Hers bare. The utter (4/5).
20The Word
- To submit, to give in to dictation is to take in,
to internalize, the Word. But the tongue that
takes the Host (the Word made Flesh) is also the
tongue that is to utter speech in a foreign
tongue as much as it is the place of the lost or
forbidden mother tongue. The dictation GOD WHO
HAS MADE YOU IN HIS OWN LIKENESS is accepted and
repeated but also turned around in rebellious
parody.
21c. Clio History
- Prelude to the first chaptera defiant evocation
of the nominal In Nomine/ Le Nom/ Nomine (21)
associates In Nomine Patris, in the Name of
the Father, which, according to Lacan, is also
the Law of the Father le Non du Père. - Inscribed in the very dictation of the title is
thus also the rebellion of the one dictated to
(dictée)and the dissolution of dictation into
the multicultural, multilingual, multimedial
play/performance of the text as counterscript
(18).
22Nine Myth
- Nine chapters named after nine muses, the
daughters of Mnemosynethe Greek goddess of
memory, who had lain with Zeus for nine
successive nights and give birth for nine
successive days. - Allusions to Demeter who, in her grief, wandered
nine days with flaming torches in her hands in
search of her daughter Persephone.
23First final pages
- The first page is a photograph of an anonymous
wall carving, according to secondary sources, it
says in Korean script Mother, I miss you, I am
hungry, I want to go home to my native
placethis was probably scratched into a wall by
Korean prisoners during Koreas occupation by the
Japanese. - The final page is a photograph cut to show nine
Korean students (among them the martyred Yu Guan
Soon).
24Lost Found
- Text
- The loss of voice and native place, the
repression of mother tongue, the pain of division
and fragmentation
- Subtext
- Connected with the number nine, is
re-constructive, stages a finding of voice, a
homecoming and a reunion of daughter and mother.
25POLYMNIA SACRED POETRY
- Words cast each by each to weather
- avowed indisputably, to time,
- If it should impress, make fossil trace of word,
- residue of word, stand as a ruin stands,
- simply, as mark
- having relinquished itself to time to distance
-
(177)
26Dictee as a poetic reading of the historical
trace
- The text, although seemingly finding rest in a
final vision of return, in fact, oscillates in
the memory of absent presence since it can mark
origin (home) only as lost to time and
distanceas trace inscribed, and as ruin
re-presented, in the word. - To evoke a pre-linguistic state of mind and
communication that can yet be rendered only in
and through words, a language beyond the dictate
of the Fathera new (yet also re-constructed)
Mother tongue.
27Cha
- The main body of my work is with Language,
looking for the roots of language before it is
born on the tip of the tongue. (Cha in Lewallen
80) - My work has been a series of metaphors for
the return, going back to a lost time and space,
always in the imaginary. The content of my work
has been the realization of the imprint, the
inscription etched from the experience of
leaving, the experience of America. (Cha in
Lewallen 76)
28Counterscript
- The writing grew out of the painful experience of
loss and exile, but opened up and explored a new,
if purely linguistic, space of belonging the
language before dictation where open, fluid,
multiple (female) self is able to find voice and
home in the very gaps and silences of the
scattered text.
29III. The Past as an Uncanny TrespasserDavid
Marshall Chans Goblin Fruit
- I want this all to be a fiction, something I
made up, something entirely of my own invention. - I want to wake up and have the past eighteen
years be just a dream.
- -- Goblin
Fruit (39)
30Dream
- a. The Same Hollywood dream of fame.
- b. The frustration of an Other imposter.
- c. The living pain of being an Analogous
brother.
31a. Show business
- the only work I read for requires an accent
Japanese businessmen Im too young to pull off,
or Korean grocers or Chinese restaurant delivery
boys (28). - The only roles I ever get, it seems, are all in
martial arts flicks, minor one-line parts
(43). - Why is my life like the plot engine of an old
Bruce Lee film? (43).
32The World of Suzy Wong
- And the bad roles and bad haircuts and stifled
careers of the Asian American actors of the 70s
and 80s and before, I sometimes feel all that
history ought to have created a better place for
actors like me. Our passages should have been
paid, for a world without the Charlie Chans, the
Suzy Wongs, the kowtowing maids and butlers and
delivery boys. What happened, I want to know? How
did that older generation let it slip through
their fingers? (44)
33everybody was too busy kung fu fighting
- The old-timersthe Chinese who first came to
Americahid their true names, adopted false ones
I read this in college in an ethnic
autobiography. They did this to elude their
enemies and American officials, all those who
were potential threats to them (46).
34b. Im invisible
- Ive stolen my brothers name. Ive lost my own
name and replaced it with a dead boys. I no
longer call myself D., but am now M. around town,
some people recognized me for the imposter I am.
Otherscasting agents, cameramen, other former
child actors whove worked with my brotherbecome
unnerved upon seeing me, mistaking me for the
original M., or perhaps not wanting to remember
how my brother died. To most people, though, Im
invisible (23).
35Goblin Men
- were pitching it as the dark side of the
E.T. storylike Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets
Aliens meets the Persephone myth as written by
Clive Barker (34) - read pages 34-35.
36c. Dream of a dead brother
- Hes Ms been trespassing in my dreams. Hes
taken residence in my thoughts. Maybe hes made
that Ive stolen his name (46). - Maybe M. doesnt know that I mean him no harm,
that all of my success is his own, all of it
achieved in his shadow. He reduces me to a
phantom of himselfhis legacy, his memory
(46-7). - Their floodlights shine through to the dark
corners of the room, revealing nothing, no
ghosts (47).
37The End